I responded very pleasantly, thanking them for their time and eventual response, and then asked why they believed that getting incorrect information -- "NULL" -- constituted more information. I got a call from the young lady who drew the short straw, and the response from her programmers was that the CSV file had more columns than the PDF file, and that's why it was more information. Huh? I thought this the dumbest response, and I couldn't believe they'd think a paying client should be OK with this.
A few weeks later, Solutions e-mailed me and told me to try to use their new, improved, Beta Web interface to run the report instead. I tried, but every time I clicked on any Report link (which I was told should take me to a parameters page), it gave me the Page Not Found error. Solutions decided there was something wrong with my system or my browser because they could log in as me and get to the report.
I contacted my internal IS department. To cover all bases, we upgraded Windows. We upgraded IE. We upgraded all kinds of things. I had to download and install 56 security patches. It took all day. I couldn't do any work in the meantime.
I still got Page Not Found. My boss got Page Not Found. My internal IS department got Page Not Found. I went home that evening and tried from home, and got Page Not Found. Aha!
I called Solutions, asked for "Joe" -- because he's the last person at Solutions to draw the short straw -- and told him about my experiment. I asked him, "Are you certain you can get to the report from a PC outside your own network?" He tried it from a PC not in his building, and he got Page Not Found. Joe actually apologized. He couldn't believe that I'd been the only person to have reported this problem. So of course, my being the only complainer, they had assumed it was my problem and not theirs. My boss and I thought this was funny -– it meant nobody was using their system, they had not asked any of their clients to test the Beta version, and apparently they weren't running any data analysis to see how many clients were using it -- or not.
Since the programmers couldn't seem to wriggle out of this one, I got the opportunity to essentially redesign the E&P while the programmers worked out the bugs on their end. The report is now available online -- and it even works too!
On a side note, this vendor wants us to ditch one of our other, more accurate and attentive software vendors and use one of their proprietary software applications instead. Not unless I get 50 percent commission, buddy.
Regards,
Difficult User #16,738
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